To Make Sure Votes Count, Sensor Device Goes Back On

By MIKE McINTIRE

Published: October 9, 2003

New York City has agreed to reactivate a feature on its 7,200 voting machines that is intended to keep people from mistakenly failing to cast a ballot before leaving the booth.

The device, called a sensor latch, was disabled by the city years ago. The decision to turn it back on settles a lawsuit filed in July against the Board of Elections by a coalition of voter advocacy groups, which contended that as many as 60,000 votes were not counted in the 2000 election because of the absent safeguard.

As part of the settlement announced yesterday, the city agreed to fix the device on all of its voting machines by March. The cost is expected to be as much as $275,000.

''This a tremendous victory for the voters of New York City,'' said Jeremy Creelan, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented the plaintiffs. ''The city board came to its senses and did the right thing here.''

Douglas A. Kellner, a Manhattan Democrat who is a member of the elections board, praised the settlement, saying it corrects a problem that had the effect of disenfranchising thousands of voters over the last 40 years. The safeguard was disabled on the city's machines in 1964 for reasons that are no longer known, Mr. Kellner said.

The sensor latch prevents voters from pulling the red-handled lever to leave the booth before either casting a vote for at least one candidate or indicating their intention not to vote.

''The problem is, many voters mistakenly think that they have to take the candidate levers and put them back up again before they pull the red handle to exit the machine,'' Mr. Kellner said. ''My estimate is that one out of about every 50 voters does that. The result is that they unwittingly lose their vote.''

The settlement reverses, for a second time, the elections board's policy on the sensor-latch issue. The 10-member board voted in March to reactivate the latches, but then changed its mind a month later after determining that the process of reattaching levers and pins through quarter-size holes in each machine would be complicated and costly.

Yesterday, the board's chief voting machine technician, John P. O'Grady, said his staff would begin working nine hours a day, seven days a week, in December to make the sensor latches functional. He estimated it would take 10 to 30 minutes to fix each of the city's 7,200 machines. ''It will be a great challenge,'' Mr. O'Grady said. ''There are only so many days and so much staff.''

The dispute over reactivating the sensor latches has played out against the backdrop of national election system reforms, enacted after the Florida recount in 2000 called attention to the unreliable and antiquated methods that many voters are forced to use. Under the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress last year, each precinct must have at least one electronic voting machine installed by the 2006 elections.

The Board of Elections has said it intends to have electronic voting machines in at least one borough in time for the fall 2004 elections.

Yesterday, the advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit referred to the Florida recount as an example of how seemingly minuscule technical issues can have an outsized impact on election outcomes. In Florida, punch-card machines that failed to record votes properly and ballots that were poorly designed were among the many problems that threw the 2000 presidential election into turmoil.

''This is one of those small rulings that has an enormous impact,'' said Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party, one of the groups that sued the city. ''This is proof positive that we don't live in Florida.''

Photo: A sensor latch, which will be made functional again by March, is seen on a city voting machine in the Board of Elections warehouse in Brooklyn. (Photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)